oh gosh yeah sorry, i just dumped a lot of shit on you :''''D
thats' really interesting actually, and makes me want to read it more. especially because the obama narrative that exists here is of him being more or less a perfect person?? obv nobody is, and if everything i've heard of him from the danish news is true, then he was probably the best president the us has had in a long time, but like. it'd be good to have some critical insight.
yeah, man i do not envy you being an american, because i can't even imagine the dissonance. like i'm not saying iceland (or denmark) are perfect either - trust me, they're not - but neither of those two countries even come close to the US in just..sheer scale of...bad shit. denmark was not just complicit in the transatlantic slave trade but an active participant (some of the old grand private residences in copenhagen? slave sugar money.), and rather liked to be like big brother the british empire. *sideeye* meanwhile, iceland started out as a fuck you to norway, but then ended up a colony, and was much too busy trying to survive and hating the norwegian king and later the danish king to really do much of anything in global politics. :''''D so i feel like, i don't have much dissonance - but i have guilt over the fact i live in denmark, which is our old colonial master? and i'm profiting off it, and all. but on the other hand, i like to think that living here is a modern type of fuck you to denmark. like denmark prevented iceland from doing a lot of stuff themselves which created a need for icelanders to go abroad for certain things - often to denmark - so it's like, ok you didn't let us do this? i'll come to you and use YOUR resources to do it. idk if that even makes sense.
oh hm, i'd have to do some digging on that. we read a lot of literature (fiction) about it in school, but i have never been very good at remembering author's names or book titles. some of this stuff was post-war in reykjavik, 50s, even 60s, which was when the rift was at its worst - the icelanders were poor and the american soldiers were just...everywhere, and they were rich, and people just hated seeing them on the street, you know? and (obv this is also misogynistic as hell) people (men) had an issue with icelandic women dating the american soldiers so that they could get their hands on material goods, like pantyhose, sanitary products, lipstick. so the literature reflects that also.
i do remember one book (i doubt it's translated) i read when i was like...idk, 11, a YA book about a boy and a girl in the same circle of friends who are all bad company, who decide to break into a store. they get caught, the others don't, and they get sent to the countryside to grow up. (yeah, that was still a thing in the 90s.) the boy only broke into the store because he was bullied for being the son of an american soldier - the other kids would call his mum an american whore, and him an american half breed - and he needed to prove himself not a coward, or whatever. well, he never knew WHO his father was, but because he didn't *have* one, it was automatically assumed that his dad was an american soldier, because, well, it wasn't an uncommon thing exactly that no father = american soldier father. it later turned out that his dad *wasn't* an american soldier, but just an icelandic dude who was an asshole in his own right, and this kid was relieved because then at least he could be secure in the knowledge he wasn't tainted by america, or whatever. this book came out in '97 or '98, i got it for christmas one of those years. (i no longer have it.)
it's possible - i'm not sure - that djöflaeyjan by einar kárason (there's a movie as well) is one of those books, but i don't remember exactly. it does take place in the post-war era, and depicts the slum in reykjavik and just how poor and shitty lives people had at the time. that's all i can remember about that specific one and that's mostly because i saw the movie. the one scene i remember vividly, from both the book and the movie, is where a man kills himself by shooting himself in the head, and because they live in what is leftover hangars or storage or whatever from the american military (a lot of people did that because they had no other option), they don't have insulation and anything? and this happened in winter, so they had trouble cleaning up because all the blood had frozen to the floor.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2019-01-03 09:40 am (UTC)thats' really interesting actually, and makes me want to read it more. especially because the obama narrative that exists here is of him being more or less a perfect person?? obv nobody is, and if everything i've heard of him from the danish news is true, then he was probably the best president the us has had in a long time, but like. it'd be good to have some critical insight.
yeah, man i do not envy you being an american, because i can't even imagine the dissonance. like i'm not saying iceland (or denmark) are perfect either - trust me, they're not - but neither of those two countries even come close to the US in just..sheer scale of...bad shit. denmark was not just complicit in the transatlantic slave trade but an active participant (some of the old grand private residences in copenhagen? slave sugar money.), and rather liked to be like big brother the british empire. *sideeye* meanwhile, iceland started out as a fuck you to norway, but then ended up a colony, and was much too busy trying to survive and hating the norwegian king and later the danish king to really do much of anything in global politics. :''''D so i feel like, i don't have much dissonance - but i have guilt over the fact i live in denmark, which is our old colonial master? and i'm profiting off it, and all. but on the other hand, i like to think that living here is a modern type of fuck you to denmark. like denmark prevented iceland from doing a lot of stuff themselves which created a need for icelanders to go abroad for certain things - often to denmark - so it's like, ok you didn't let us do this? i'll come to you and use YOUR resources to do it. idk if that even makes sense.
oh hm, i'd have to do some digging on that. we read a lot of literature (fiction) about it in school, but i have never been very good at remembering author's names or book titles. some of this stuff was post-war in reykjavik, 50s, even 60s, which was when the rift was at its worst - the icelanders were poor and the american soldiers were just...everywhere, and they were rich, and people just hated seeing them on the street, you know? and (obv this is also misogynistic as hell) people (men) had an issue with icelandic women dating the american soldiers so that they could get their hands on material goods, like pantyhose, sanitary products, lipstick. so the literature reflects that also.
i do remember one book (i doubt it's translated) i read when i was like...idk, 11, a YA book about a boy and a girl in the same circle of friends who are all bad company, who decide to break into a store. they get caught, the others don't, and they get sent to the countryside to grow up. (yeah, that was still a thing in the 90s.) the boy only broke into the store because he was bullied for being the son of an american soldier - the other kids would call his mum an american whore, and him an american half breed - and he needed to prove himself not a coward, or whatever. well, he never knew WHO his father was, but because he didn't *have* one, it was automatically assumed that his dad was an american soldier, because, well, it wasn't an uncommon thing exactly that no father = american soldier father. it later turned out that his dad *wasn't* an american soldier, but just an icelandic dude who was an asshole in his own right, and this kid was relieved because then at least he could be secure in the knowledge he wasn't tainted by america, or whatever. this book came out in '97 or '98, i got it for christmas one of those years. (i no longer have it.)
it's possible - i'm not sure - that djöflaeyjan by einar kárason (there's a movie as well) is one of those books, but i don't remember exactly. it does take place in the post-war era, and depicts the slum in reykjavik and just how poor and shitty lives people had at the time. that's all i can remember about that specific one and that's mostly because i saw the movie. the one scene i remember vividly, from both the book and the movie, is where a man kills himself by shooting himself in the head, and because they live in what is leftover hangars or storage or whatever from the american military (a lot of people did that because they had no other option), they don't have insulation and anything? and this happened in winter, so they had trouble cleaning up because all the blood had frozen to the floor.